President Donald Trump’s promise—and subsequent executive order—to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America displayed a showman’s flair for branding.
Today Trump could take that showmanship a step further when Air Force One flies him across the Gulf of Mexico from his private Mar-a-Lago retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, to New Orleans for the Super Bowl.
The ad that Hims & Hers Health plans to air during the Super Bowl comes at you with rapid-fire visual overload—a giant jiggling belly, bare feet on scales, X-ray results, sugary sodas, a pie in the oven, a measuring tape snug around a waistline—all set to the frenetic hip-hop beat of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America.” A disembodied voice warns: “This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to keep us sick and stuck.
I Maps
The corner of Ashmun & Grove & the sometimes
When the only evidence is a map; the disappearing
English of old: plat, a funky word that exists most
In memory, meant to make a plan or map of;
To draw to scale; to plot.
A man who cannot read coordinates can still plot
On his freedom. Imagine a rectangle on the oldest
Map in these nine squares of geography
Once called a wilderness.
Companies are so invested in making their Super Bowl ads a success that we’ve lost something in the process.
Mark Zuckerberg and other execs might follow Elon Musk out the door.
The gutting of government statistics is a recipe for chaos.
Historian Quinn Slobodian joins Felix Salmon to discuss how his book on market radicals is more relevant than ever.
The Trump political appointees are leading the agency’s “collaboration” with Elon Musk’s team.
It’s the latest lawsuit pushing back on the Trump administration’s shakeup of the federal government.
The Louisiana Republican said he hoped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would be “a partner” in promoting good health.
As a doctor, Cassidy is troubled by RFK Jr. As a politician, he has reason to support him anyway.
Kennedy’s approval by the committee is far from certain.
The Waves also discusses the Riverside Church controversy and the case of Sarah Milov.
What we say matters, especially depending on whom we say it to.
The Waves also discusses the case against Jeffrey Epstein and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble.
Supporters of climate, infrastructure, mortgage, tech, health, veterans’ and other projects expressed alarm as tens of thousands of programs appeared possibly at risk.
Joe Biden’s top economic adviser opens up on harrowing moments from her time in the White House, and what makes her nervous about the Trump agenda.
Miran has called for a sweeping overhaul of the Fed to ensure greater political control over the central bank, including giving the president the power to fire board members at will.
The Trump administration is planning to shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency and has placed nearly 170 employees on administrative leave. “I’m very concerned about the deregulation and the focus on corporate profits,” says Mustafa Santiago Ali, the former head of the environmental justice program at the EPA.
A lawsuit by a coalition of labor unions Thursday prompted the Labor Department to agree not to release any sensitive economic and privacy data to DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. Musk’s group has already gained access to sensitive files and computer systems across other key agencies as part of a push to restructure much of the federal government.
We speak with Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California about the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on the federal bureaucracy and the gutting of various agencies, led by the president’s unelected billionaire adviser Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
“No DOGE employee should have access to any of Americans’ sensitive, confidential information, and they should not have access to be able to stop payments,” he says.
As the Trump administration, led in part by his unelected adviser Elon Musk, sets its sights on cutting the Department of Education, we speak to longtime educator Jesse Hagopian about what he calls an “extremist, authoritarian power grab to dismantle public education and enforce ideological conformity.” Hagopian, whose new book, Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education, traces the history of racist educational censorship, adds, “This isn’t about protecting children.
Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is moving quickly.
On Friday night, Kennedy Center President Deborah Rutter informed board members that some of their colleagues had already received termination notices from the administration. And she said that Trump appears to have the legal authority to take the unprecedented step of firing them before their six-year terms expire.
For a moment, the threat of guac-ocalypse loomed over America. Had President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada gone into effect, the prices of avocados and tomatoes would have skyrocketed in the approach to Super Bowl Sunday. Trump may be bluffing about his willingness to start a trade war, but the grace period he negotiated with those nations lasts just 30 days. Yesterday he said that he would announce tariffs on even more countries—he didn’t specify which—in the coming week.
Along a busy four-lane road in Kaga, Japan, situated between strip malls and rice fields, is a firewood business called Kuberu, meaning “to stoke a fire.” On many weekends, when the weather is pleasant, I join a group of four or five people to chop wood and stack it beneath rows of solar panels. In exchange, I get to fill the back of my pickup with firewood for heating my own house.
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Elon Musk is targeting federal agencies, slashing workforces, and crippling programs that support millions of people around the world.
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“The quest” is a well-worn literary trope: Characters travel long distances and face obstacles in hopes of finding justice, or revenge, or forgiveness. But when real people go on quests, their goals can be a little more eclectic.
